Heroines

"It wasn’t long after I finished my big Femmes du monde project that the Cité Royale de Loches asked me to produce portraits of heroines from the past. Women who have marked the history of France. My soul still imbibed with my encounters with women on the five continents, I gave free rein to my inspiration of the moment to execute this order. So Anne of Brittany, Joan of Ark and Agnès Sorel took on the traits of women from today, some of them familiar to the general public: actresses.

I represented the first woman, Anne of Brittany, against a pastoral backdrop. Gypsy caravans can be glimpsed through her window. The scene is inspired by a famous painting by Vincent Van Gogh. Charles VIII married Anne of Brittany in 1480, and I wanted to show that already at that time, Roms were living nomadically in France. In fact, France as we know it didn’t even exist yet, but the Roms had already been there for sixty years!

My Joan of Ark is a haloed warrior wearing a keffiyeh and armed with a Kalashnikov. If the term had existed at the time, Joan would have been deemed a 'terrorist' by her enemies while others considered her a resistance fighter.

Finally, Agnès Sorel embodied scandalous sensuality and the epitome of beauty in her lifetime. Portraits from that period readily showed her with one breast exposed. Artists would refrain from portraying the child nursing at her breast! More of a courtesan than a virgin mother, I tried painting her with the traits of Scarlett Johansson. It seemed to me that today, many see the American actress as representing the type of femininity that is much fantasized about." 

Titouan Lamazou